[Gllug] just a quick question

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 06:27:45PM +0000, Ben Fitzgerald wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 05:06:45PM +0000, Rich Walker wrote:
> > "Martin A. Brooks" <martin at hinterlands.org> writes:
> > 
> > >
> > > sendmail is in the pile of stuff marked "you were great once, but we grew up, and you didn't".
> > > 
> > 
> > That's a marvellously precise description of it :->
> > 
> > Are there *any* good uses of M4 left?

Any left ? were there ever any good uses in the first place ;-)

> 
> I'm not saying it had to be written in m4, but that wasn't quite how you
> worded your question ;-), so my example would be autoconf:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/

The idea of autoconf make is a good one - the implementation using
m4 is pure evil. When people say autoconf sucks, 99% of this dislike
is directly attributable to the pain & suffering of writing macros
in m4. m4 is

  good for: inflicting pain
            obfuscating code
  bad for: maintainable programs
           ease of use

Dan.
-- 
|=-            GPG key: http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt       -=|
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|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
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